BIRDWATCHING: Theodore Payne Foundation, King Gillette Ranch

I'm actively going on bird walks to discover new places around LA to be outdoors.

The Theodore Payne Foundation, set against the hills in Sun Valley, does exemplary work educating Angelenos about landscaping, and supplying native plants to the LA Basin. 

The day I chose, to join a bird walk, there were only 3 of us, and "Ken", or "Emperor Ken", as he refers to himself on his website, led the walk.  He's Ken Gilliland, well known for his work in the film industry doing 3-D bird modeling, and his commitment to birds and habitat. 

Ken led us about, and in a low-key and easy way, told stories about the birds we saw - giving equal time to commonly sighted birds as well as expertly IDing little gray sparrows and bird songs.

Did you know scrub jays hold funerals for a member?  They gather together for a day and "talk" about the individual.  Who knew?

Sooty Sparrow

Golden-crowned sparrow

California Thrasher

Yellow-Dumped "Audubon's" Warbler

Pine siskins are about this time of year, too - will watch and try not to confuse them with this delightful bird, an yellow-rumped warbler, plentiful in the laurel-sumac bushes.

Nice to know the name of these common little fellows I see about on almost every walk.

White Crowned Sparrow

Sunday I went on a walk at the King Gillette Ranch, a wonderful Santa Monica mountains location before the hills' rise. The buildings were designed by Wallace Neff, a famous regional architect, and among other functions, was a Claretian monastery for some years. Finally it was purchased by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and became a magnificent public park.

acorn woodpecker

  An oak woodland area, it is primo for woodpeckers.  I used to love seeing them in Wisconsin as a child, taking them as a common sighting, loving the sound of pecking as new storage holes were fashioned to store acorns.  Scott, the birdwalk leader, told the group (65+), about social structure in acorn woodpecker families, and their use of granary trees, even building in redundancy if one granary fails by storing extra in a different location.  

Nuttall's woodpecker

Later, we got a very good view of a Nuttall's woodpecker as well - a distinctive ladder back pattern, but not to be confused with a ladder-back, which is a desert bird.   

Oak titmouse

 This oak titmouse I found by myself, on the bridge where a brush-covered slope permits passerines to approach the water from cover and then quickly fly back.

Lincoln's sparrow looks a bit like a white-crowned, will have to look further to feel like I really "own" this species.

American Widgeon

Among the plentiful mallards mucking about in the vivid green duckgrass, Scott found this duck, one I'd seen before up at the bird marshes, but was pleased to see again, my second special seasonal duck sighting.

 Last, a group of us watched female western bluebirds, almost indistingable, they were so dull, flying back and forth from utility wire to ground, brunching on insects.  Glad the bird leader told us what they were - this ID I will work on too.

It's lovely to catch the bright blue of a male if the sun is right.  Unforgettable blue, like a jay, or some blue fish.  Even the cinema cannot render for us that neon flashing glory color. 

We also saw mule deer and unexpectedly lovely, a pair of buckeye butterflies.

ART, THE SPECIAL PURPOSE OF DRAPERY, Robert Morris

How often I have been struck by the expressive power of drapery - for grief, how it covers and reveals the defeated, succumbed, accepting body beneath. 

The act of covering the body, its soul passed from our loving circle, so intimate, loving, and final an act.

Consider concentration camp and prison photography, folds falling with strange and ghoulish elegance over emaciated bodies at Auschwitz, stripes ever repellent to me as a shape arrangement after seeing those dreadful images.  

 Mourners from the tomb sculptures of the Court of Burgundy - almost genre, doll-like, plentiful, a riff on draped biblical clothing as imagined in western art.

These resin-coated linen "sculptures" by Robert Morris stunned me.  As a child I was fascinated by the stories and paintings of lepers, supplied courtesy of my Catholic school education.  I saw the film "Ben Hur" as a child, too, those huddling figures   - how they covered their bodies and their pleading eyes. Even then the drapery's folds seemed beautiful to me.  At the time it seemed like the worst fate that could befall a human - that was before I knew about Auschwitz.

In Star Wars, Disney, and medieval tales, characters wrap themselves in cloaks and veils, somehow adding stature and power to their narrative purpose, extending their personal space.  Who would follow closely upon Darth Vader as he sweeps into a room, his black cloak swirling about him?  Or Maleficent, as she appears in the Great Hall to curse the beloved child? 

Then consider Judith Jamison, her dress swirling in "Cry", the impossible clashing dynamics of those ripples and folds, against the hard and frozen valleys and hills of folds against these soulless suffering bodies.    

Christo's draperies for the most part were quite joyous, playful, celebratory:  fabric defying its purpose - a fence of rippling opening cloth instead of cattle restraint, umbrellas for sheltered pleasure, or to gift-wrap an island.  

Of all the works, only "Reichstag" seemed genuinely ambiguous - the sins of Nazism covered, so shameful that they cannot be visual,the proof needing to be always before our eyes.

And the strange white tight pleating, making the fabric-nature look starched, rigid, tight, revealing the classical form and its archetypal message of  glorious humanism.

"Dying Gaul" is certainly present beneath this drapery - questions about covering and uncovering the body, death, privacy, intimacy, the morality of war arise for me.

I think it's incumbent upon serious viewers to undertake to see the artwork from a  aesthetic point of view, developed from theory, history, personal insight, inquiry. 

I wonder if it's moral or even fair to the art to use it for access to places of profound personal grief and shame.  Isn't it truthfully a  narcissistic, subjective. even cathexic (cathexis, Freudian idea) using art for access to stimulus to personal analysis?

Is instrumentalist art even moral?  Or merely manipulative?

Nonetheless, my take-away is the instant access to a vision of compassion springing up from knowing of unspeakable atrocity and needing to go on.  Isn't "Dying Gaul" going to get up and stagger away instead of slipping to the earth's embrace?  Maybe.  I wish it so.